Friday, 1 January 2010

Melancholy night. Beauty to bed early. A new local abused/abandoned cat hung out mewling at the door. Fed him thrice. Each time, finishing, he licked his chops, looked up and said, Not enough.

Brief post midnight hobble in the city streets: drunken strangers talking merrily into space on cell phones outside the imperial palace while the full moon surrounded by clouds shone down upon them through the monkey trees.

Later to Himachal Pradesh and dipping butterflies; found Allen Ginsberg waiting with the wisdom of the ages.Another yearhas past -- the worldis no different.

A.G. was right. Every expression is a falling silent. The departure of the calved sections of a glacier, and the entry of the calved sections into the flow of the surrounding ice.

Cars whoosh past shaping the phantom party of the night. A sound disengages itself from the others, then stops. Once again the world disappears through its veils of transcendence. The tree trunks cease to stand out from the rest of the dark. The raccoons moving through the branches are the only thing that gives life away.

Full moon surrounded by clouds: photo by Downtowngal, 2009Mother raccoon (Procyon lotor) with four kits in a tree: photo by AndrewBrownsword, 2009

12 comments:

These melancholic reflections struck a chord, Tom -- also, memories of raccoons stealing into my rented Bolinas home, ravaging the pantries, leaving their paw prints on the toilet . . . one day later, the moon obscured by clouds in San Diego as well.

Steve . . . sorry I missed you when I was up your way last month; your current series is lovely. Do you know a book by Angus Fletcher called Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare? Good stuff.

Joe,Nice to see/hear you here! (hope you see this Did you know that Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet is now out (from Counterpath -- my long-in-the-works book on offstage action in Hamlet (maybe you'd be interested).Steve

Always good to hear from you, Aditya. This strange binary number year with only twos and oughts and ones in it prompts me to think of song titles like Love = Zero (No Limit), One is the Loneliest Number... but a better one would be Two to Tango (a better number for communication).

Don't know if you tango much in Himachal Pradesh and I don't think a raccoon would make a very good winter night tango partner. But one thing the two of us ought to be clear on, this will be a year of better dreams for Aditya. Let that phone just ring and ring, soon enough it will get tired and leave off.

I knew something was up two nights ago in the midst of one of these inundating downpours when one of the cats kept whimpering strangely at a glass side door. Went and looked, a raccoon was standing out there with snout pressed against the glass, looking like a drowned rat, as buckets of rain dumped on him through the busted gutter. Felt bad about not letting the poor guy (girl?) in, but it just wouldn't have worked. Last night in attempted compensation I offered three meatloaf sandwiches and a box of chicken into the ivy where the raccoons lurk. Better wet and fed than wet and dead, though of course killing a raccoon will always take more than a flood. Mostly it's the whizzing vehicles of the normals on the freeway feeder that do that.

We used to get them in the courtyard of some apartments we lived in, so we starting putting out fruit parts etc for them, but how i really remember them is from oklahoma on my grandfather's farm, they grappled for crawdads by sticking their hands down the mud holes. you'd even find little piles of shells.

In our contemporary archeology of ruin we know them by their traces on the sedimentary layers of tarps that masquerade as a roof here, every time we go up to try to straighten things out a bit (losing battle) after a windstorm like these recent ones, the scene is a complex litter of raccoon scat. We can hear them lumbering around and squealing and chattering up there o'nights, they come down out of the redwood and leave us these small hard black fecal deposits, like clusters of stony black grapes, the calling card of the urban wild.